


The Quiet

by singhappythings



Series: Flufftober 2020 [1]
Category: Bones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Flufftober, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:33:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26769553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singhappythings/pseuds/singhappythings
Summary: Brennan and Booth. The quiet after a tough case.Set between seasons 6 and 7. Fluff, a little smut.
Relationships: Seeley Booth/Temperance Brennan
Series: Flufftober 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1953523
Comments: 3
Kudos: 91





	The Quiet

**Author's Note:**

> Flufftober 2020, day 1, "In The Shadows."

Outside her office, the lab is half-dark. Most everyone has gone home, save the security guard that circles through every forty seven minutes. The forensic platform looms--all metal and safety lights, a cold frame in the darkness. 

Angela said it was creepy when she called tonight, the lab sterile and empty save for dead things and whatever’s living in Hodgins’ office this week. She’d begged her to “get out of there at a reasonable hour, please, Sweetie. And I mean 7, not 10:30. Get some rest. I know this was a tough one.”

But this has always been like rest to her--the quiet after a hard case. Cocooning in the warm glow of her office, dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s on the paperwork. She takes a sip of cold tea and closes her eyes for just a moment, just long enough to feel the weight lift a little. She’ll admit she’s tired, yes, but she’s fine.

When she opens her eyes, he’s there.

“Booth.”

She isn’t startled, just pleasantly surprised, as he steps out of the shadows.

“What are you doing here?”

His tie is undone, his suit jacket loose. He looks tired.

Angela was right, this case was tough. Kids always are. She knows he was going to see Parker tonight, that Rebecca told him he could come over for dessert and to say goodnight. So what is he doing in her office, now, well past Parker’s bedtime?

He shrugs as he slides down onto her couch.

“I figured you’d still be here. Paperwork done?”

She glances back at her monitor, and the words bleed together before her eyes. She hits save, more sense memory than an actual ability to see the little disc in the corner of the screen.

“Yes,” she says. She turns the monitor off.

It’s just a few steps to cross her office, to collapse beside Booth on the couch, but she’s so tired by the time she gets there that her eyes drift closed, her head lolling against Booth’s shoulder. It’s still new, touching him without feeling like she’s crossing a line. Beneath the fatigue, she feels that small thrill run through her. Touching Booth.

He wraps his arm around her, pulls her closer against his side. She takes a deep breath, maybe the first in hours, the first since he read the mother her rights. She can smell him--sweat, diner fries, spearmint gum, and her body wash under all of it. Her sense of smell has never been this strong.

She hums into him.

“How was Parker?”

A single muscle in his neck relaxes. She can feel it, but she’s too tired to name it. “Good. He was good. He didn’t know anything was…” his words fade out, his spare hand gestures towards the empty room. “You know.”

She nods.

“How are you?” he asks.

She blinks her eyes open, scans her body. “Sore,” she says, “and tired. I find the fatigue is more overwhelming than I expected.”

His shoulders shift towards her, cradling her closer to his chest. “You’ve got to take care of yourself, Bones,” he says. It’s not scolding, not exactly, it’s concern, but it still rankles.

“I am, Booth,” she says, pulling away from him. Sitting up to face him on the couch. “I’m just tired. Fatigue is a very common side effect of early pregnancy, the result of increased progesterone levels. It’s nothing to be--”

“I know, Bones,” he says, cutting her off, pulling her back towards him. She holds out, but just for a moment. She is so very tired, and his arms are inviting. She gives, shifting back towards him, her back against his chest. His hand drifts down to rest on her stomach, still flat beneath her blouse. He presses a kiss to her temple. 

She hears herself sigh.

They haven’t told anyone yet. She’s afraid of the professional repercussions, what the FBI will do, and he’s superstitious. And there’s the thing they’re both afraid to admit--that it could all fall apart. That, after all this time, all this waiting and longing, they’ll get it wrong.

“What’s between us is ours, right?” he’d asked over breakfast at the diner, the morning after she told him. His foot tangled around her ankle under the table, and she smiled around a bite of pancakes. A moment later Sweets was there, and Booth startled and bumped his knee against the table and his coffee went over in his lap and he cursed, long and loud, till Frankie yelled from the kitchen, and the moment disappeared. But still, they had an understanding. They’d wait, for now.

But they’d have to tell people soon.

“I could fall asleep right here,” he says.

“Mmm.” That’s not a word, she thinks.

But a moment later he’s moving behind her, sitting up, sitting her up.

“We should go, though,” he says, and she struggles to open her eyes. “Come on, we can go to my place. It’s closer.”

She wipes at her eyes as he grabs her bag from behind her desk. He comes back to pull her up, and she leans her weight into him as he guides her towards the door.

She’s loath to admit it, independent as she is, but it’s nice to be cared for like this. Cared for by  _ Booth _ like this. At the door to her office, he reaches out to untuck her hair from where it’s stuck beneath her collar, and she feels the ghost of his fingertips against her neck the whole walk down the hall. He holds the elevator door as she steps in, and his hand flits across the small of her back as they walk towards his car.

She thought he touched her a lot before, but it’s nothing like now. Whenever they’re together his hands are on her, hot and dry against her skin. She wakes in the night to find his arms around her, his breath slow against the back of her neck. Even around the others he trails fingers down her spine, loops his pinky around hers, stands so close their pulses race in sync. Before, when they touched, it was like a game of chicken neither of them could bear to lose. Now it’s a thirst that can’t be quenched.

Traffic is light, and it’s just a few minutes before they’re parking outside his building. He comes around the car to open her door and only pouts a little when she’s already stepping out onto the sidewalk.

“I’m not an invalid, Booth,” she says, but she lets him take her bag, and hold the door for her. 

Upstairs, she leans against his door frame while he digs his keys out and she watches him. 

He’s so serious late at night, his brow furrowed and his tongue between his teeth. He gets the lock open and she follows him in, watching his shoulders move beneath his suit jacket as he stows his gun in the safe. A moment ago she was so tired, but now she feels herself waking up.

“Did you eat anything?” he asks her, disappearing into the kitchen.

“Not much.”

He comes back with a container of cold chow mein and two sets of chopsticks. 

“This is all I’ve got.”

She takes it from his hands and sets it down on the coffee table.

“Not hungry?”

She steps closer to him, close enough to feel his breath on her cheek, and takes his suit lapels into her hands. It’s a small movement, turning her face up to his, pulling him forward, into her, until his lips are on hers. It’s an unhurried kiss, and she melts into it, into him. She’s been waiting all day for this moment.

His arms wrap around her waist, pulling her closer, and then his hands are skating up her sides until he’s cupping her face. He deepens the kiss as he steps forward, his leg sliding between hers, guiding her, turning her, and then he’s sitting on the sofa, pulling her down to straddle his lap. He tugs at her blouse, pulling it from the waistband of her skirt.

He’s smooth, she can’t deny it.

She leans back, gasping for air, and his lips trail down her jaw, her neck, her clavicle. Her hands find their way under his jacket and then she’s pushing it off, over his broad shoulders. He works her skirt up to her waist and his fingers slide under the fabric of her panties as she struggles with his belt buckle and the zipper of his pants. She goes clumsy and limp as first one finger and then two enter her. 

He’s so good at this.

She thinks she knew he would be--he’s always been passionate and tactile, and something has always sparked and flared between them--but this is still more,  _ so much more _ , than she expected. 

His thumb brushes over her clit and something like a growl rises up her throat. She finally gets his pants undone, has him hard in her hand, and then they’re both frantic, pulling aside fabric, bucking against each other until he’s inside of her and she’s clinging to him, draped over those broad shoulders, her mouth hot behind his ear, his against her neck, both of them still mostly dressed.

It’s been like this every night, ever since things started between them.

She’s a pot boiling over. Now, yes, her orgasm rising along her core and spilling through her, but also all the time, every minute since she finally fell into his arms two months ago. Even when she’s exhausted--and she’s always exhausted now--she feels it like a low simmer. Like she can’t calm down. Like she doesn’t want to. She wants to feel like this  _ always _ .

He bucks up inside of her one last time, and stills. They’re both sweaty in their clothes, sticky, but they stay pressed against each other. He turns them, leans back until he’s lying on the couch and she’s lying on top of him, still holding him, still breathing hard and heavy. 

“How,” he says into her hair, not quite a question and not quite not.

“Hmm?”

“How did we wait so long to do that?”

He’s asked this over and over again. She used to know, to have an itemized list of every reason it was a bad idea, of why it wasn’t rational. But she didn’t know that she was missing this. 

She presses a kiss to his temple, and slides off of him sideways, wedging herself between him and the back of the couch. She’s exhausted again, and ravenous. She reaches across him to grab the Chow Mein off the coffee table, and nearly spills it all over them in an attempt to eat it without sitting up.

“Whoa there, Bones, slow down,” he says. He’s laughing, unwrapping his chopsticks.

“I’m starving, Booth.”

“So am I.” His chopsticks tangle with hers in the container.

“We worked up an appetite.” 

He grins at her, and the simmer starts to roll again, low in her belly. “We’re good at that, huh?”

She grins back. She kisses him. Because she can.

For a second they forget the chow mein again, get lost in each other again. (“Was making out always like this?” she wonders, before losing her words.) Then she really does spill the container, and they’re covered in noodles, and sweat, and the long day. She pulls back from his kiss.

“I should pee,” she says, matter of fact.

“Ahh, romance.”

But he laughs again (he’s always laughing now, she loves to make him laugh). She climbs over him and stands, straightens her skirt, and he scoops noodles back into the container. 

She’s struck again that this is how things are, now. That, even if this--Booth’s hand on her back, his breath on her neck, sex on the couch after a long day--doesn’t work, doesn’t last forever (and she knows, and keeps reminding him, that it may not), that they are now bound together through the fetus she’s carrying. That even if the things she’s feeling are just chemical, they have still created life together.

Her hand flits across her stomach, the facts of their case coming back to her again. How, she wonders, could that mother have done such a thing? She pushes the thought aside, back into the box at the back of her brain where she stores the cases she can’t bring herself to think about.

“What?” he asks, startling out of her thoughts, and he realizes that she’s been staring at him. “Do I have chow mein on my face?”

“No.” 

She leans down one more time, kisses him one more time.

Because she can.


End file.
